Bower Manuscript
The Bower Manuscript is a collection of seven fragmentary Sanskrit treatises found buried in a Buddhist memorial stupa near Kucha, northwestern China.
The story begins with the brutal murder of Andrew Dalgliesh, a Scotsman camping in the Karakoram mountains, north of Kashmir.
The British government wanted to bring Mahomed to justice, and therefore sent Hamilton Bower with some troops to go after the killer, states Wujastyk.
[12] Bower took the manuscripts with him when he returned to Simla and forwarded it to Colonel James Waterhouse, the then President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
[13] At the meeting, he stated that Bower visited the site where the manuscript was found, and referred to the stupa as something that looked like a huge "cottage loaf" near the "Ming–oi" Buddhist monastery ruins, 16 miles from Kucha near the banks of a river.
German Indologist Georg Buhler succeeded in reading and translating two leaves of the manuscript, reproduced in the form of heliogravures in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
He presented the first decipherment two months later, at the meeting of the Society in April 1891, with evidence that it was "the oldest Indian written book that is known to exist".
[14] Between 1893 and 1897 Hoernle published a complete edition of the text, featuring an annotated English translation and illustrated facsimile plates.
[7] The Bower manuscript, as discovered, had 56 birch bark leaves, cut into oblong palmyra shape (rectangular strips with rounded corners).
The pages are bound in Indian style, with each leaf containing a hole about the middle of the left side, for the passage of the binding string.
[15] Hoernle determined that the manuscript belonged to the 4th or 5th–century because the script used matched with dated inscriptions and other texts of that period in the north and northwest India.
These treatises were prepared by scribes, buried in a stupa built at some point to honor the memory of a Buddhist monk or some other regional influential person.
[7] He added that there may have been more than four scribes, because Part VI has some scribal differences, while V and VII too seems cursive and careless work of possibly more than one person.
[18] Part VI, and possibly V and VII were written by scribe(s) who may have come to China from a region that is now the central India to Andhra Pradesh, for similar reasons.
[18] The writer of part IV appears to have the style of someone used to "writing with a brush", and therefore may have been a local native or a Buddhist monk who came from interior China.
The scribe of divination and incantation sections (Treatises IV-VII) was not conversant with classical Sanskrit, made grammatical errors and used a few Prakrit words.
[16] The manuscript is mostly in the Shloka verse style – a Vedic anuṣṭubh poetic meter (exceptions are found in Part I of the collection).
[1] It opens with a flowery description of the Himalayas, where a group of rishis reside, interested in the names and properties of medicinal plants.
It mentions Hindu sages such as Ātreya, Hārīta, Parāśara, Bhela, Garga, Śāmbavya, Suśruta, Vasiṣṭha, Karāla, and Kāpya.
[23] Parts IV and V contain two short manuals of Pāśaka kevalī, or cubomancy, i.e., the art of foretelling a person's future by means of the cast of dice, a ritualistic practice found in Tibetan manuscripts.
The Mayuri text, in later centuries, became a part of the Pancha-raksha magical incantations group – one of the highly popular dharani sets in Buddhist communities in and outside India.
[12] Famous explorers were commissioned by some of the world's major powers of the era – such as Britain, Germany, Japan, France, Russia – to go on a Central Asia and Xinjiang expedition.
[29][30] The European Union-funded International Dunhuang Project has continued the legacy of the Bower manuscript which in part inspired Rudolf Hornle to seek funds from the then Government of India to finance the first 1900–1901 expedition of Marc Aurel Stein.
